ARTS/ARTIFACTS

Furniture a Gun Moll Would Have Found Just Swell

By MITCHELL OWENS

Published: June 15, 1997

FROM STEVEN SPIELBERG'S Jurassic redux to the velvet-suited, dentally challenged international man of mystery from the 60's, the superspy hero Austin Powers, reanimation is in the air. So it seems appropriate that James Mont, one of the dinosaurs of American style, is making a comeback. As revivals go, it is a modest one, but well deserved.

Tough-talking and criminally abusive -- he spent a good part of World War II in Sing Sing for beating up his business partner's girlfriend -- the Turkish-born Mont, who died in 1978 at the age of 74, was a prodigiously, if erratically, talented designer of Asian-theme furniture, accessories and interiors. It was a look that could be called Runyon Moderne, beefy, broad-shouldered objects imbued with a Pacific Rim flavor that appealed to gun molls and their brass-knuckled protectors.

When Mont was interviewed in 1947 by the radio hosts Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg -- the Regis and Kathie Lee of the day -- most of their questions focused on Mont's underworld connections. Gangsters put him in business on the Atlantic City boardwalk in the 1920's, and Frank Costello, one of New York's Mafia kingpins, helped keep the designer's constantly capsizing business afloat for decades.

Not that Mont, who was born Demetrius Pecintjoglu in Istanbul and immigrated to the United States in 1922, has entirely languished in obscurity. Dealers with a funky attitude, like Suzanne Lipschutz of Secondhand Rose, touted Mont in the early 1970's, but to little effect. Even then, his oeuvre was considered too camp.

A few years ago, however, Alan Moss, the owner of a vintage-furniture emporium on Lafayette Street, and Liz O'Brien of 41, a similarly themed shop in SoHo, began putting Mont's more streamlined postwar chinoiserie in their windows. Hip young collectors -- bored by Jean-Michel Frank, untempted by Warren MacArthur, unimpressed by T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings and still not convinced that the mild-mannered Austrian emigre Tommi Parzinger was antiestablishment enough to merit their attention -- took notice.

At Christie's East on Tuesday, Mont, the mustachioed maestro whose work had long been disparaged as ''Oriyenta,'' finally made an impression uptown. The covers of the catalogue of the day's sale of 20th-century decorative arts were prime evidence. Instead of illustrating crowd-pleasers like the bronze-and-glass lanterns from Louis Comfort Tiffany's Long Island house, the covers were all Mont.

On the front was a close-up of the silver-leaf bamboo carvings on the double doors of an eight-foot-tall oak breakfront; on the back was the image of a pagoda-shape table lamp sheltering a fierce porcelain deity. Seventeen of the sale's 245 lots could be traced to Mont's five-floor showroom and workshop at 214 East 52d Street, where the designer's 50-man crew of woodcarvers, gilders, upholsterers and metalworkers created them as part of a 1946-47 commission for a house on Long Island.

Estimated to bring $34,100 to $49,400, the 31-piece collection brought a respectable $44,400. The surprise of the afternoon was Lot 177, a pair of pickled oak three-drawer dressers: estimated at $3,000 to $5,000, they sold for $10,000.

Beth Vilinsky, the head of the 20th-century decorative arts department at Christie's East, said interest in the Mont pieces came from both America and abroad. ''People in the American trade are certainly familiar with him,'' Ms. Vilinsky said shortly before the sale began. ''But the international appeal was unexpected. And these were private people, not dealers, and most of them didn't know who Mont was. But they were very impressed with the sumptuous finishes, the bold forms, the Asian inspiration. Plus, it's functional, which you can't say about a lot of modern furniture.''

It is resilient too. Fond of carefully rehearsed public tantrums, Mont would stagily stalk his workrooms, a gullible client in tow, and suddenly attack a sofa with a knife, denouncing the upholsterer and yelling that the work was wrong, all wrong.

Mont's nephew, John Karfo, an architect in New Jersey, saw his uncle shove a cabinet down an elevator shaft as he screamed that its finish was not fine enough. It was all an act, performed for maximum effect (the cabinet was probably fished out later in the day, repaired and sold to someone else). ''The client would be so impressed at his demand for perfection that she would sign blank checks for him,'' Mr. Karfo said.

Mont was not just about theatrics, however, though his billboard-size sense of drama may have been one reason he was hired to design nightclubs in the Catskills and provide furniture for ''Lend an Ear,'' a 1948 Broadway musical revue with Carol Channing.

His furniture was also innovative, and Mont was a master of adaptive reuse. Lot 188 in the Christie's East sale was a mahogany coffee table that used a windshield from a naval PT boat for its top. (It sold for a bargain price, $800.) Mr. Karfo said that this table and similar ones had all been built about 36 inches square to fit the windshields: the bullet-repellent glass was too difficult to cut down.

''It's furniture with an attitude,'' Ms. Vilinsky said. ''Once you know about Mont's personality, it becomes this great package deal: sensationalism and craftsmanship all in one.''

Photos: A carved pickled oak breakfront with table lamps, circa 1947, and, right, one of a pair of pickled oak dressers that sold for $10,000. (Christie's New York); Theatrical To impress a buyer, James Mont was known to get rough with a sofa or a cabinet when he had to.